Just a place to hang my stuff!

Category Archives: Oil on Canvas

I hate winter here. I was born and raised in the Arizona Sonoran desert and I’m just not used to the weather here in Iwaki, still. My last attempt at a landscape was last December and it started snowing in the middle of the session. To make matters worse, this place is super windy, almost always so even when the weather is good it’s not easy. Anyway, today was the first day this year worthy of going outside so I did so. I had to grab the setup a few times when the wind caught the umbrella but managed to squeak this one out…

You seriously lose all sense of time when you are in the “zone.” I started this at 4 pm in the afternoon, finished it around 8:30 pm and it seemed like only 2 hours had passed. Anyway, I purposefully chose a blue background as a complementary color to the orange-ish color of the whiskey. When put into a small shot glass, you get yellow for some reason but whatever, just went with it. I usually don’t draw this out in charcoal but in this case I wanted accurate proportions on everything so I skipped laying it out with a brush.

This is my fourth landscape within the last month. The view is off of the road going to the Iwaki Flower Center. I did something different this time, that being, I took a pair of +3.0 reading glasses and painted it wearing those. This blurred my vision of course but it helped me to simplify shapes and colors and I was happy with this new technique. That, combined with the umbrella is giving me much brighter, not so overly dark colors.

There is a place nearby where I live called the Flower Center. Well, outside of it being a very beautiful place, there is a very old temple nearby. I’m not really sure how old it is, but it must be hundreds of years old. I went up to it and I was the only one there. The trees in the background were the hardest part, I don’t think I pulled this one off. Actually, I went there twice and the second was better, but I need to try it again one more time.

Been spending some time getting my gear back up to speed. Took the French easel out last week and did a F3 canvas of rice fields in harvest. That thing is heavy and requires constant maintenance so now I’m thinking it’s time to break out the pochade box. Unfortunately, the 8 x 10 inch canvas size of that pochade box fits no frames here in Japan at all, so now looking to purchase a new box that will work over here. In the meantime, I’ll stick to the French easel.